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[RRE]hazards of design 3/3

``` as marginal or eccentric, or as an extra elaboration that can be removed without wrecking the whole. This is demonstrated by Noble's reconstruction of the richly developed eschatological tradition of masculine transcendentalism.

My purpose here is not to recapitulate this demonstration, but to specify its role in the lived work of computing. Computer people often rebel at the sound of this project, and understandably so, as the ordinary, settled-down-to-serious-work computer work is not filled with theological terms. Supernatural authority is rarely invoked as an internal component of a technical argument, and so ordinary practitioners can be forgiven if theological speculation seems to them wholly the province of philosophers and the popularizations of a field's founders and promoters.

Before arguing that this impression is misleading, let us briefly revisit the cases of Babbage and Wiener. For Babbage, the essential qualities of intelligence were foresight and vigilance, and Babbage was perfectly explicit that this characterization applied equally to the intelligence of machines, factory administrators, and God. The autonomous skill and culture of the workforce was of no account in this scheme, of course, and the factory-as-microcosm was projected as a mechanistic order under the surveillance and superintendence of intelligent machinery. Babbage's theology, then, was part and parcel of his representation of work, and specifically his systematic withdrawal of attention from its skillful, improvised, locally ordered, lived character. Babbage's mechanistic workers resembled Garfinkel's sociological dopes, and indeed Garfinkel (1996: 1), citing unpublished research by Rawls, alleges that Durkheim founded an unacknowledged tradition where by "General Ideas of the Universal Observer are commonly used in the social sciences to topicalize and justify valid knowledge of every possible thing in any possible world."

Wiener, for his part, "saw power and control as absolutely central to the very definition of cybernetics" and "the human-machine relation as a model, if not an incarnation of the bond between God and 'man' " (Galison 1994: 260). The omnipotence of the engineer, for Wiener, is not the institution of a rational order but its continual homeostatic maintenance through the agency of negative feedback. As in the case of Babbage, the defining characteristics of the engineer sufficed to identify the human being with God, that other designer and controller.

Wiener's theology, like Babbage's, portrays the universe as a mechanistic order, and in each case both God's purpose and the engineer's is to supply a uniform principle of order that obviates any more local principle. Wiener also went further; absent this imposed order, he clearly felt, the world would be chaotic, and this conception of the world as a hostile enemy had an immense influence on subsequent technical practice. The principle of feedback, after all, permits a designer to delegate the work of ordering. Even though the designer cannot know what moves the enemy is going to make, the implemented servomechanism can make those judgements on the spot, tracking the world and bounding any discrepancies between system and world. Even as it proposes a solution to the problem of unpredictable context, Wiener's figure of the enemy makes emphatic the hazards that the designer must necessarily face.

Thus theology and hazard are internally related moments of the historically evolved social location of the engineer. This is, so to speak, the negative theology of engineering; even when the vocabulary of this theology is not present, it still expresses a structure that runs deep in the practices of engineering on an ordinary level. The positive theology of engineering, equally prominent, is the already-mentioned millennialist aspect of masculine transcendentalism. Invoked in numerous forms in the propaganda for numerous large technological projects for centuries, its core is an opposition between a technologically determined utopian future and an otherwise decadent present. Whether invoked by institutions or against them, it opposes concrete experience to an abstract vision. Neither aspect of engineering theology has any place for a cultivated attention to the lived work of accomplishing a technical order: the negative theology locates its alternative organizing principle outside of the lived space of this work, and the positive theology locates another, teleological principle outside of lived time.

//9 Ritual order

A certain theology, then, can be found in the structure of engineering discourse, offering among other things an alibi for the inattention of technical practice to the local ordering of activity. This is a purely ideological analysis, however, and not an account of the situated work of designing and using computers. The specifically religious practice of computing is not to be found in overtly religious speculation by the likes of Babbage and Wiener, and it is useful to understand precisely why not. Religious issues do arise with remarkable consistency when the intellectual categories of applied computing are pushed to their limits in the specifically discursive work of the popularizer and philosopher. For example, any discussion of whether a machine "really" thinks or "really" acts is liable to lead to a struggle with some version of the soul, and indeed I have argued elsewhere that at least one prominent class of technical methods in AI is lineally descended from Cartesian conceptions of the soul. These questions do not often arise in the daily practical work of computing for the simple reason that this work rarely presents the general question of whether machines "really" exhibit the intentional states that are ascribed to them. This "really" indexes a concern with some order of intellectual completeness and closure that goes beyond the practices of transcoding and their systematic production of technical glosses for vernacular intentional categories. Authors such as McDermott [ref] have mocked the "natural stupidity" of using a grand word such as "understanding" to gloss the operation of a simple technical mechanism that does not deserve the name. But the daily work of computing proceeds largely unconstrained by such cautions, and certainly without the benefit of any elaborated critical discourse on the suitability of appropriated terms.

What computing does have is the situated practice of narrating the workings of machinery. So far as technical people are generally concerned, this narrative work is underwritten solely by the formal definitions of the terms. But these definitions do not provide for what is centrally at stake, namely the point-by-point correspondences between the elements of formalism and the empirical phenomena that the technical system is supposed to reproduce. Designers and users alike are greatly aided in establishing these correspondences by the unremarkable workings of the documentary method of interpretation, whereby the narrative and its context (the running system or the designer's scenario) are made to elaborate and specify one another. Just what the narrative is reporting emerges in large part in what the program is doing. The natural "vagueness" of ordinary language is a resource in this way for an enormous variety of situated description practices, and technical practices are no exception. What is at stake in any given occasion of narrative work is the import of this term in this context, only for all practical purposes. This latter condition is crucial: in situated technical narration, words find their meanings for the purposes of a particular moment, not "really" for all possible purposes.

On the level of practice, then, the internal relation between theology and hazard is to be sought not in discourse but in the organization of practice itself. Following Keane [ref], I want to suggest that it be sought specifically in the ritual order of computer use: to use a computer successfully, at least in accordance with the kinds of success that designers project when they design, is to enact the formal order of a ritual. "Formal" here, of course, takes on two meanings, that of ritual performance and that of technical representation, and the overlap between these meanings should be regarded as a hypothesis and not a fait accompli.

A good place to start is with traditional conceptions of both ritual and technical work. As Keane [ref] puts it, "[w]hen most successful, ritual performance works by a circular logic in which it creatively brings about a context and set of identities that it portrays as already existing." Such is also the case of computer system design, whose first step is the articulation of a grammar of action for the site whose activities the system is to represent. Designers present this ontology and grammar as already existing in the site, as structures already immanent in that site's activities. And yet much of the work of implementing a new system is arranging for the activities actually to conform to the ontology and grammar of action that the system inscribes, and moreover to do so accountably -- and not just accountably to the site's members but also for purposes of capture by the machine. From keypunch data entry to barcode readers and wireless handheld transaction units, technical means are proliferating for maintaining a correspondence between the unfolding structures of human activity and the accumulating data structures of the machines. This correspondence can only be established, however, so long as the activity is accountably isomorphic to the formal structures that the design process has inscribed.

The traditional understanding of ritual is, however, Keane argues [ref], insufficiently attentive to the hazards inherent in formal representation. I will consider two of Keane's further elaborations on the traditional theory. The first pertains to the internal relationship between hazard and cosmology. The Indonesians in Keane's ethnography regard their present-day rituals as mere shadows of the more perfect rituals of their ancestors, and in speaking formally they endeavor to speak with a double voice. Not only do they express themselves as individuals with concrete involvements and relationships, but they also endeavor to speak on behalf of their clans, ancestors included, and to live up to the elevated standard of performance that such an endeavor entails. "These scenes of encounter", he suggests, "work to display and tap into an agency that is assumed to transcend the particular individuals present and the temporal moment in which they act." The models provided by the ancestors confer form and order on the proceedings, not to mention justification and prestige; like any norms, they also provide the reflexive basis for collectively establishing what is happening in the interaction from moment to moment. And yet, Keane points out, the necessity of embodying this transcendent order entails hazards with which any ritual performer must contend.

The situation is similar in computer use. Computers bring with them a transcendental order; they cannot contribute to any other kind of order, for the reasons we have seen. Keane's informants portray their actions as shadows of their ancestors', and computer people understand actual occasions of computer use in terms of the many glitches through which they depart from the transcendental order projected by the designers. The undoubted practical efficacy and cognitive structuring often afforded by computers, not to mention their justification and prestige, are bought at the price of considerable hazard.

Keane's second and more provocative suggestion involves the representation of hazard itself. If human achievements draw their recognizability as achievements from the obstacles they overcome, then the hazards of ritual must be as visible as its material outcomes. To speak on behalf of the ancestors is to hold oneself to high standards, and the rituals that Keane describes include abundant references to their own character as ritual and thereby to the mass of constraints under which ritual performers operate. The hazards of computing are likewise represented in the innumerable disaster stories from all sides. These stories sometimes function as folklore, in which case they frequently recount the supposed consequences of a single mistaken keystroke. Many other such stories are perfectly accurate and recount unfortunate mismatches between the assumptions inscribed in a machine and the reality of its operating environment, or else the consequential misunderstanding of a machine's outward states. It would be hard to demonstrate that such stories are told with the purpose of dramatizing by contrast the successes of expert users, but that is one effect they frequently have. The hazards of design are not entirely hidden.

To the extent that it aligns itself with the abstractions that were imagined and inscribed in the process of design, computer use thus exhibits a ritual order that visibly manages the hazards of design. As a result, something of the designer's distance from the sites of use is reproduced within those very sites. The smoothest possible functioning of computer use requires that the version of local reality that has been inscribed in the workings of the machinery -- the transcoded version of the local discourse that seeks to stabilize meaning in formalisms whose consequences depend on the context in very different ways than any use of the local discourse -- be accountably reproduced all over again on each successive occasion -- not necessarily as the whole of the setting, but certainly as a discrete element of it. To use a computer, one must learn to see one's own self and activities in the way that designers do, and in that way to construct oneself as an object of technical representation. Participants in religious rituals experience themselves as objects of divine knowledge; participants in technical rituals experience themselves as objects of technical knowledge.

//10 Ethnomethodology and local knowledge

I opened with the difficult question of the relationship between two religions, the engineers' and the shamans', and with the hypothesis that this opposition might be aligned with the opposition between universal and local conceptions of order and knowledge. What sense can we now make of these matters?

The internal relation between the two forms of religion does help resolve one longstanding puzzle: the divide in technical work between permissible and impermissible attributions of intentionality to artifacts. This distinction is not just the outcome of a locally evolved moral order, I have argued, but is also a product of technical practices: those intentional attributions that can be accountably transcoded into a suitable relationship with an implementable formalism may be accepted, and others will not be. The puzzle concerns the vehemence with which computer people so regularly reject what they view as excessive and ungrounded anthropomorphism. The answer does not lie in a generalized conservatism about intentional ascription, since the computer community broadly and the AI community in particular will happily embrace any technical transcoding that seems useful. The answer, rather, is that nontechnical intentional ascription is a kind of heresy, namely animism: the suggestion that nonhumans possess intelligence and vitality of their own account, and not in virtue of their inclusion in a universal order. Indeed, this very explanation is frequently offered by computer people who are offended by loose intentional talk, for example when such talk shows up in their own transcodings of sociological texts. The language of mysticism and magic carries great force in the technical community, as indeed in other religious communities that define themselves in opposition to shamanic cultural forms.

Nonetheless, I want to hesitate before turning the sociological dispute between ethnomethodology and the "worldwide social science movement" (Garfinkel 1996: 5) into a religious controversy. Ethnomethodologists are not shamans; the hidden realms from which they bring back such wisdom are hidden right in front of our eyes. Ethnomethodologists also believe that the methods by which people put the world together are tangible and explicable, albeit with great difficulty, whereas shamans seek the powers that put the world together outside of human beings and their choices. Nothing resembling divination is found in ethnomethodology, which would surely treat such things as accounting practices like any others. Whether this approach is to ethnomethodology's credit remains to be seen; the idea that the whole world is a product of human effort has much to recommend it, particularly when the alternative is the woolly stipulations of functionalist sociology, but it also has much to recommend against it as well. Ethnomethodology is, in this sense, the purest atheism.

A more promising approach begins with the contrast between universal and local standpoints in the discursive construction of knowledge. In these terms, ethnomethodology might be viewed as one representative in an antirationalist tradition that cuts across the political spectrum from Hayek [ref], with his insistence on the impracticability of reconciling every economicly pertinent aspect of every locality in a centralized fashion, to Haraway [ref], with her insistence on the qualitatively distinct epistemological standpoints that correlate with the whole matrix of distinct social locations. [This is not really right.] Both of these authors denounce the universalistic standpoint that they identify with scientific reason. Intellectuals from Vico and Hegel to Marx and Lenin have imagined themselves to be able to encompass the whole world in their minds and thereby to uncover the telos of history. The modern theorists of locality have renounced this power, insisting instead that intellectuals are just as finite as anyone else. What is distinctive about Garfinkel's approach is his refusal to deny the practical accomplishments of formal analysis and its institutions. By seeking to respecify these accomplishments of particular people in particular settings, ethnomethodology does nothing more than making these accomplishments explicable at all.

What, then, of system design? The delusions of formal analysis remain no less delusional for all the efficacy of the practices that have been institutionalized in its name. Ethnomethodology is fundamentally an ethical project, one that seeks to protect indigenous language from being usurped and transcoded under the auspices of intellectual systems, whether these be sociological or technical or otherwise. It rightly refuses to have its insights reappropriated as resources for further usurpations of the same type. The proper object of ethnomethodology is methods, period, and not the reform of professional practices. At the same time, plenty of system designers are ethical people who want to do a better job. To the extent that ethnomethodology illuminates the systemic hazards of traditional modes of system design, it helps to make reform imaginable. So long as technology coevolves with religious beliefs whose roots draw nourishment from nothing deeper than a defensive reaction to its own intrinsic hazards, nothing can change. It is time to disentangle the practices of technology from bad religion and begin to align it with some deeper purpose.

//* Bibliography

Bowker

Bud-Frierman

Button

Clement

Crosby

Derrida

Galison

Garfinkel 1967

Garfinkel 1996

James W. Gibson, Warrior Dreams: Paramilitary Culture in Post-Vietnam America, New York: Hill and Wang, 1994.

Gibson

Goffman

Haraway

Hayek

Jameson

Kay

Keane

Kling

Latour

McDermott

McReynolds

Mead

Nass

Noble

Porter

Schaffer

Schutz

Suchman

Suchman and Trigg

Woolgar

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